


stretch out my life and pick the seams out

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Before the Awakening - Greg Rucka
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/F, M/M, Pining, Rapier Squadron bants, Slow Burn, sinfully obvious in the heights reference, sinfully obvious undertale reference
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-05-31 09:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6464377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was once a boy like Finn and Poe loved him so earnestly that the universe took him away. He's not going to make that mistake again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. watch me stumble

**Author's Note:**

> i regret everything  
> btw this fic borrows parts from both the film and the novelization(s) so it's a weird mix of stuff oops
> 
>  
> 
> also some parts have been changed to accommodate for story (e.g. the distress signal)

The first time Poe ever flies, he’s seven years old and very excited. He sits on his mother’s lap and she puts her helmet on his head. It’s a little bit too big for him and it clearly hasn’t been used for a while but the comforting weight of it sends a shiver of excitement through him.

“Don’t be scared,” she says, tying her hair up into a ponytail that cascades down her back.

“I don’t ever get scared,” Poe declares boldly, blindly putting his hands on the controls that appeal to him the most. That is to say, they’re brightly colored and close enough for his short arms to reach.

“Alright, my brave boy,” his mom replies, laughter ringing in her voice as she reaches out across the control panel. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“What are you doing right now?”

“Just disabling the firepower,” she says, smiling down at him. “We don’t want you accidentally blowing anything up, right?”

“No, we don’t,” Poe says obediently, ‘cause that would probably be bad. Mama’s ponytail is falling over her right shoulder again as she leans forward, sharp eyes darting swiftly around the A-wing control board, hands moving even faster. God, his mom is so cool.

“Mama,” he says. “You’re the best mom ever.”

She looks down at Poe with bright eyes, warm smile spreading across her face. She kisses his temple tenderly. Her hands are warm and slightly rough when she puts them on his, gently guiding him to the right controls. “You ready?”

“I’m ready!” Poe replies, excitement crashing over him like a tidal wave as Mama flicks a lever and pushes the joysticks forward. The A-wing rumbles to life and begins to cruise forward, gradually picking up pace. Poe’s stomach drops as the gentle hands guiding his pull the joysticks back and slowly, steadily, the Starfighter begins its ascent.

They soar, up, up, and up. Poe can’t help but whoop as Mama takes them higher, coursing through the atmosphere, cutting through the clouds. The sky blurs into a mix of of blue, white, black, as they race forward. Poe screws his eyes shut, the sheer velocity of their ascent making his stomach lurch. Then, suddenly, the whooshing stops as Mama flicks another lever. The A-wing stops, floating aimlessly what feels like nothingness, and Poe opens his eyes again to see what’s happened.

Around them, he sees inky blackness punctuated by stars, and his lips part slightly as his eyes widen in wonder. They smile back at him: bright, twinkling, and so much more alive than they ever seem from the surface of Yavin 4.

“Oh,” Poe whispers, awestruck, leaning forward to press his hands and face to the glass of the cockpit, desperately seeking out any and all fragments of light among the darkness. “Mama, look!”

“I’m looking,” Mama replies from behind him, and he can feel her smile as she tousles his hair.

Pretty soon, Poe decides that he’d like to see more stars. Mama takes his hands and helps him navigate them elsewhere, soaring over the moon they call home. Poe looks up at the stars and tries to memorize every one of them, one by one by sparkling one, until they all blur together into one bright haze. Mama lets him go around Yavin 4 once before she places her chin on his head and says: “We need to go back now, Poe.”

“Ay, no,” Poe protests, not ready to leave the stars just yet, lest he forget them, and they him. “Ten more minutes?”

“ _Lo siento, mi amor,_ Papa is waiting,” comes the reply as Mama takes over, pinpointing their landing point on the map above the dashboard. Poe settles back down on her lap, feeling safe here, trusting in his mother’s experienced eye.

Mama never tells stories about her time in the Rebel Alliance, says that her service wasn’t important enough for her to tell stories about, but he knows better: Papa has told him about it before, how he and Mama saved the galaxy. Poe remembers only one thing, a hazy memory from the first two years of his life: sitting in Abuelo’s lap as he watched choppy holovids of A-wings diving, over and over again, spitting blaster fire that crackled and flashed like lightning.

“Papa,” Poe asks that evening when Papa tucks him into bed, peeking out from under his blankets. “Why does Mama never talk about the war?”

“War is not beautiful,” Papa tells him, absentmindedly stroking Poe’s hair. “Mama and I fought the Empire but a lot of beautiful things got lost along the way. You’re too young to know about it.”

“Mama is beautiful,” Poe points out.

“Yes,” Papa replies quietly, brushing a stray curl out of Poe’s face.

“You didn’t lose her.”

“We didn’t lose you, either,” Papa says, and kisses Poe’s forehead. “When you find something beautiful, you hold onto it, even if it doesn’t last long.”

“Like flying,” Poe murmurs as Papa stands up. “Or stars.”

“Or stars,” Papa echoes, turning the light off. “Goodnight, _mijo.”_

“Goodnight, Papa.”

Poe closes his eyes and dreams of flying, of tumbling and turning, of laughing wildly, of Mama, of Papa, of stars.

 

The medallion on Mama’s bedside table has been untouched since she came to Yavin 4. Poe holds it in his hands for the first time when he is eight years old, brushing away the dust to see her name, emblazoned proudly in gold and silver _._

He holds it gently, the way she used to hold his hand, tracing the carved symbol of the Rebel Alliance over and over until he can memorize the way it feels under his finger.

Papa pats his shoulder. He’s been very quiet.

Even though she’s surrounded by her favorite pink flowers, Mama looks sad. She’s not laughing or smiling and her hair isn’t windswept. Her arms are by her sides, limp and loose. Poe reaches down and gently places the medallion on her lapel, lump in his throat.

“Mama,” Poe says, voice breaking on the second syllable, and puts his hand in hers. It’s cold.

“Mama,” he repeats, trying not to cry. But Mama isn’t stroking his hair anymore, or telling him that he’ll be okay, or brushing away his tears.

“Poe,” Papa whispers, and his voice is thick.

“Mama,” Poe says again, pleading, and now there are tears on his face.

“ _Mijo_.”

Poe reluctantly takes his hand out of Mama’s, feeling her limp fingers slip through his. Papa picks him up, envelops him in his arms, solid and warm even if his shoulders shake with labored breaths. Poe buries his face in the crook of Papa’s neck and screws his eyes shut, not wanting to see Mama the way she is now as they walk away.

 

The stars outside the window of the starship are exactly the same as he remembers. Poe stands by the window, one hand lightly resting on the glass. His eyes seek out the same patterns that he found during that first flight in his mother’s A-wing, a little over twenty-three years ago. There’s a medal on his own lapel, not as bright and proud as the one he placed over his mother’s still heart, and it’s not the Rebel Alliance’s symbol, but it belongs to him.

There’s a presence beside him. He tears his gaze from the stars to look over at Iolo Arana, who is munching corn chips and looking out the window, too. Poe wonders if the galaxy looks different to Iolo – if stars are brighter to Keshians than they are to humans, and wishes (not for the first time) that he could see what Iolo sees.

“Pretty lights,” Iolo remarks.

“Yeah,” Poe says. “Are you excited?”

“Excited to see where you were born and raised? Hell yeah,” Iolo replies, tossing a sideways grin at him. “I want to see if they make ‘em all like you on Yavin 4 or if you’re the only one who’s like this.”

“We’re all the same,” Poe says lightly, smiling despite himself. “Must be something in the water.”

“Oh, well,” Iolo mumbles through a mouthful of chips. “At least it’s a change from Mirrin Prime.”

“I miss BB-8,” Poe says mournfully.

“Lame,” Iolo replies cheerfully. He looks over at Poe, round eyes a deep green. “Hey, Karé says it’s your turn to tag in. You and Muran, chilling in the cockpit.”

“Shut up,” Poe mumbles as Iolo cackles and nudges his shoulder.

They land on Yavin 4 at 1634 hours. A light breeze ruffles Poe’s hair as he steps out of the starship and walks down the ramp, breathing in the familiar scent of Yavin 4 for the first time in a long time. He’s barely stepped onto the ground when he spots a familiar face: a girl, just a little bit shorter than him, running towards him with a grin on her face.

“Poe!” she says, and punches him in the shoulder when she gets to his side. “What’s up, man?”

“Bianca,” Poe replies with a smile. “How ‘bout a hug?”

“If you insist,” she replies, and hugs him, smelling of sunshine and raindrops at the same time. Behind them, Karé whistles, bag over her shoulder.

“Who’s this?” she asks, features sharp in the crisp afternoon sun.

“Bianca Bey,” Poe says, letting go of her. “My cousin.”

“Nice to meet you, Bianca,” Karé says with a lopsided grin, and holds out a hand. “I’m Karé.”

Iolo alights next, looking awkward.

“This is Iolo,” Poe says. “He baked a pie for you.”

“Dude,” Bianca says, eyes lighting up immediately at the mention of pie and pushing past Karé, who looks slightly offended. “Really?”

“Uh, yeah,” Iolo replies, and it takes him a little while to fish the pie out of his bag. “It’s, um, butterscotch with a little bit of cinnamon. Poe said it was your favorite.”

“Second favorite, but thanks,” Bianca says, eyes gleaming and gaze intense. Poe bites back a laugh at the flustered look on Iolo’s face as Bianca takes the pie out of his hands.

“Poe,” Muran calls from the ship, and Poe’s head turns so quickly that Karé snorts and Iolo rolls his eyes. “Come get your shit. I’m not going to do it for you.”

“Sorry,” Poe calls out sheepishly, to which Karé mutters: “Whipped.”

“You be quiet,” Poe says.

He takes them all to Bianca’s apartment, where she’s said they’re allowed to stay for the week. In the very next hour, Poe loses both Karé and Iolo: Karé because she says she wants to experience Yavin nightlife, and Iolo because he mentions he can make cupcakes too, prompting Bianca to take him to the kitchen for a live demonstration. That leaves him with Muran, who is currently putting the tiny plant he’s been nurturing for several weeks on the windowsill.

“Hey,” Poe says from the door of the room that he and Muran are sharing for the coming week. Iolo prefers to sleep on the ship and Karé is rooming with Bianca, although Poe has a feeling that Karé won’t be in the room very often. “It’s just us. What do you wanna do?”

“See what embarrassing posters you had on your wall as a child,” Muran deadpans immediately, carefully watering his plant, and Poe laughs.

“I only had one, and it wasn’t a poster,” Poe replies, still smiling. “It was a picture of Leia Organa I took from library records and blew up.”

Muran laughs too at this, and Poe’s chest floods with warmth at the rare but beautiful sight. He crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe in an attempt to look cool and suave. “Hey, are you hungry?”

“I guess I could eat,” Muran replies, standing up and dusting off his shirt. Here on Yavin 4, where the roofs are low and the windows are wide, he towers, dark head only a few inches away from brushing against the ceiling.

“Great,” Poe says with a beam, and takes Muran to his favorite restaurant for dinner. Muran looks uncomfortable and a little out of place, but Poe grins at him from across the table and recommends his favorite dishes, trying his hardest to make one of his favorite people in the world feel at ease.

That week, Karé spends a lot of time with Poe’s old friends, which is not ideal. Iolo teaches Bianca how to bake her favorite confectioneries. So Poe spends most of his time with Muran, who looks more and more relaxed every day as the week goes on. His eyes are still dark and icy but he smiles more now, more than he ever did holed up in Mirrin Prime. None of them like it there: it’s stuffy and grim, with the threat of the First Order constantly hanging over them.

Poe takes Muran to all his favorite spots on Yavin 4, talking endlessly about his experiences and what he loves about his home planet. Muran just listens, matching Poe’s stride and looking around, taking everything in. They walk around all day, stopping at places Poe used to frequent while he was growing up.

One night, when things are very quiet, Poe sneaks up to the roof of the building with a bottle of beer. Feet dangling lazily off the edge of the building, he pops it open and drinks. Up here, everything is calm.

Someone clears their throat behind him and Poe turns around to see Muran standing there, arms crossed, faintly amused expression on his face.

“Muran,” Poe says, smile instantaneous.

“Commander,” Muran replies.

“Come on,” Poe says, patting the spot next to him. Muran hesitates for only a moment before walking over, purposefully leaving some space between them when he sits down. Poe rolls his eyes a little bit before shifting over until their shoulders are touching.

“How’d you know I was up here?”

“I have exceptional hearing even when I’m asleep,” Muran says. “Or maybe I wasn’t actually asleep and heard you get up.”

“I can’t imagine which one it could be,” Poe says, and laughs. “You want some?”

“No, thanks,” Muran replies, gazing out. From here, it seems like the entire moon is stretched out in front of them. The lights of the city that are still on twinkle below their feet, scattered out across the dark landscape. Above their heads, stars gleam in the night sky.

It’s like a mirror image. Above them, light. Below them, light. Around them, everywhere: light.

Poe looks over at Muran and the gleam in Muran’s dark eyes is bright, too.

“I’m, um, enjoying it here,” Muran says.

“Aw, you like my home planet,” Poe says teasingly, nudging Muran’s shoulder with his own. Muran’s eyes flicker down to him for a split second before returning to the landscape, faint smile on his face.

“Any place that produces people like you is alright in my book.”

Poe’s breath hitches in his throat, fingers tightening around the neck of the beer bottle. He takes a swig – something, anything, to distract him from the fact that the smile on Muran’s face lit by the dim light of the faraway stars is suddenly the brightest and most beautiful thing he’s ever seen in his life.

It doesn’t help. His eyes are constantly drawn to the soft angles of Muran’s face and fixate on small details: the slight curve of his mouth, the stubble on his sharp jaw, the tuft of hair tucked behind his ear.

Poe’s heart is pounding so loudly that he’s very grateful Muran doesn’t actually have superhuman hearing. Muran’s shoulder shifts against his.

“That’s really nice of you to say,” is the only thing Poe can think of to say in response. “Are you going to take us to _your_ home planet anytime soon?”

“Probably not, ‘cause it’s not like anyone’s going to be there to greet me anyway,” Muran says, and looks down at his knees.

His expression doesn’t change but his knuckles, gripping onto the edge of the rooftop, turn white. Poe’s heart sinks. Muran never talks about his past, only giving vague tips, like the fact that he’s from the Outer Rim.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Poe says.

Finally, Muran looks over at him and manages a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s okay.”

“What, um – what happened?”

“You don’t really want to hear that story,” Muran chuckles humorlessly.

“I’m not going to make you tell it,” Poe replies, voice low. “But if that’d make you feel better... I’m here.”

Muran seems to consider it for a while, staring down at his legs as they dangle over the city. Finally, he clears his throat. “Well, um, my parents were both soldiers. They died fighting for the Rebel Alliance.”

“That’s,” Poe starts, but can’t quite finish.

“I guess I thought joining the Republic’s starfleet would maybe – I don’t know. But we’re doing fuck-all to combat the First Order, so.” The forced smile seems to become a grimace.

“Muran,” is all Poe can think of to say.

“I know,” Muran mumbles.

He stops, seems to struggle with something. Poe barely breathes, lost for words.

“You know what’s shitty? When they died, I was one. I barely even knew them. I had to find out their names from the Republic archives. But I still feel like I should do something to – fuck, I don’t know. Avenge them.”

Poe looks out at the horizon as the silence thickens. The stars above their heads stretch out endlessly.

War isn’t beautiful. A lot of beautiful things get lost along the way. But Muran is still here.

“You’ve done enough,” Poe says, and places a hand on Muran’s. “Hey, buddy, _really._ We could never do half the stuff we do without you. And I bet they’d say that, too.”

Muran looks over at him and Poe is suddenly hyper-aware of the lack of distance between them. He holds Muran’s gaze, and if he thought his heart was beating loudly before, it’s almost deafening now. Muran’s lips purse slightly and Poe’s eyes are immediately drawn to them, breath hitching.

Then Muran turns away, drawing his hand away, and it’s over. The heat in the air dissipates and Poe is left, mouth dry and breathing uneven, to watch the stars.

 

On the last day of their trip, Poe wakes up early in the morning, before Muran does. He throws on his brown flying jacket, which still smells a little bit like Muran (impressive, considering Muran gave it to him half a year ago), and slips out of the room.

The streets are quiet. The sun is still watery and weak, casting a faint light over everything. Poe walks without having to look, so familiar with the streets that he navigates them automatically, thoughts drifting away: thoughts of dark hair, of icy black eyes, of lips slightly parted in sleep.

These thoughts are driven away when he makes a turn and finds it, a small house at the edge of one of Yavin 4’s forests. Poe pushes open the gate he used to swing on as a child, walks over the grass his mother cut every day, knocks on the door that his father carved when their old one was ruined in a storm.

The door opens and Kes Dameron stands, a cup of caf in his hand. He almost drops it in surprise.

“Poe?”

“Papa,” Poe says, and smiles.

“Poe,” Kes repeats, smiling back, eyes crinkling more than they used to. He opens his arms for a hug and Poe immediately flies forward, face in the crook of his father’s neck.

“I have missed you,” Kes says into Poe’s ear. “Nice jacket.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” Poe mumbles back. “And thanks.”

 

When Poe gets back to the house two hours later, Muran is sitting on his bed, writing something down and eating one of the many cupcakes that Bianca has gleefully made under Iolo’s tutelage.

“Hey, Muran,” Poe says from the doorway, and something about his voice must be different because Muran looks up, swallowing a mouthful of cupcake.

“Poe,” he replies. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, of course,” Poe says, although his heart is aching just a little bit. Muran looks concerned, standing up and walking over to Poe.

“Really?”

Poe looks up at Muran and that warmth floods through his chest again. Muran’s eyes are sharp but gentle. Poe looks into them and finds it slightly harder to breathe, chest tightening.

“Can I show you something?”

“Of course,” Muran says.

Poe takes Muran back to the house where he grew up but they don’t go inside. Muran casts a look over at the house, at the sign on the fence that says _BEY/DAMERON_ , and doesn’t comment.

Poe leads Muran to the forest next to the house, heart beating in his ears. The last time he was here –

Pink flowers line the path as they finally emerge in a clearing. Poe stops near the edge, physically unable to get any further: he feels paralyzed, limbs refusing to listen to him. Muran stands next to him.

In the middle of the clearing sits an A-wing. It’s polished and well-maintained even though it’s obviously been through quite a bit. Poe feels tears pricking at his eyes at the sight, remembering the way the stars looked from the cockpit, twinkling beams of hope in the pitch blackness. His fingernails are digging into his palms as he blinks rapidly, trying not to let the memories overwhelm him.

Then, a gentle hand on his shoulder. Muran moves closer and Poe looks over at him.

Muran gets it. Muran remembers the stories Poe tells about his mother, the daring pilot. His father, the brave soldier. How they saved the galaxy. Muran understands.

Poe feels a surge of something strong in his chest, wants to wrap his arms around Muran, to thank him for understanding without him having to say anything. But Muran doesn’t hug anyone. Poe’s certainly never hugged him. He’s afraid he’ll ruin the moment if he starts now. So Poe stays frozen to the spot, Muran’s warm hand on his shoulder.

He smiles a little bit, and Muran looks down at him and smiles back.

 

After Yavin 4, things are different. Poe returns to Mirrin Prime a little sadder than he was before. Karé returns with much more information about Poe than he would have liked. Iolo returns with an entire bag of confectioneries that Bianca has baked for his departure.

Muran becomes stressed, annoyed Muran again, but now his eyes soften when he looks at Poe and he smiles more when Poe is around. It’s a change that is sudden but wholly unsurprising – to Karé and Iolo, anyway.

In the next month, Poe’s heartrate is perpetually in flux, speeding up automatically every time Muran walks into the room. He goes to sleep thinking about jet black hair he wants to run his fingers through and intense gazes he wishes would be directed at him.

“Poe, you fuck,” Karé says one day after Muran goes to bed for the evening and shoots a quick smile at Poe as he leaves. “Are you ever going to do something about that?”

 

Poe and Muran are both working on their X-wings in the hangar and wearing their flight suits, when the distress signal from the _Yissira Zyde_ comes in. Karé and Iolo come bursting through the doors when the call for Rapier Squadron is broadcast, droids rolling along behind them, beeping rapidly to each other. BB-8 chirps loudly at them to shut up and listen.

“There’s been a distress signal broadcast from the _Yissira Zyde_ ,” Major Deso says, looking at the information on his tablet. “It says that it’s been hijacked by the First Order. The information is being sent to the maps in your X-wings. You depart in T-minus ten minutes.”

“Copy that, Lonno,” Poe says. Deso shoots him an annoyed glance and leaves.

“Ten minutes?” Iolo exclaims in annoyance. “I gotta run back to get my shit. Fuck.”

“Me too,” Karé says, saluting Poe and Muran as she turns. “See you guys in five.”

The two of them take off, leaving Poe with the man he’s been thinking about for the past thirty-five days. The air is charged somehow, pre-mission anticipation combined with festering tension: Poe bites his lip as Muran turns away. BB-8 nudges Poe’s leg.

“Not now, Beebee-Ate,” he mutters. It gets very offended and scampers off, presumably to talk shit about Poe to Muran’s droid, who scuttles away from Muran’s X-wing on its four spindly legs. Muran is hunched over his X-wing and tinkering with something, laser-focused.

“Muran,” Poe starts, walking up.

Muran turns around, tinkering immediately forgotten, and smiles a tiny smile. “Yeah?”

“What’re you doing?”

“Just repairing my sensor systems,” Muran says, sounding cheerful – or as cheerful as he can sound, anyway. “I’ve been putting it off for a little while.”

“Good idea,” Poe says, hating the utter blandness of his replies. “I should probably check mine, too.”

“Yeah, you should.”

Poe bites his lip as Muran waits for another response. He wants desperately to keep Muran’s attention but he is completely drawing a blank. Poe Dameron: conversationalist extraordinaire, defeated by a man with a sharp jaw and endearingly tousled hair.

The only thing he can think of one the spot is: “Are you, uh, excited?”

Muran looks at him in mild disbelief, then shakes his head and chuckles a little. “As excited as I could ever be to shoot down First Order ships, I guess.”

“So, like, pissing-your-pants excited?”

Muran full out laughs then, a ringing sound in the quietude of the dimly lit hangar. Poe’s eyes snag onto the corners of his lips, delightfully upturned, and the heat in his chest turns into a burning flame. The straps on Muran’s flight suit are clutched in his fingers before either of them knows it and he presses forward, colliding with Muran. Muran, surprised, stumbles back until he hits the side of his X-wing.

Poe’s breathing is already uneven and the heat of this proximity is overwhelming him. Muran looks like he’s about to say something so Poe does the only thing he can think of to do, rising to his tiptoes and tugging Muran down so he can press their lips together.

It is not at all as romantic as Poe has always imagined: it’s clumsy, messy, hurried. His hands are balled into fists on Muran’s chest, clutching at the front of his flight suit. Muran’s arms are on his shoulders and it feels like he’s trying to push him away as well as pull him in closer.

Poe breathes Muran in, reveling in Muran’s warm and familiar smell, feeling Muran’s heartbeat pulse beneath his hand. He breaks away briefly and Muran’s breathing is uneven, too, hands tightening on his shoulders. His dark eyes are even darker now, sharp and intense and focused on Poe.

Poe takes a second to let them both catch their breath before Muran’s pulling him back in, lips colliding with his with a sense of intense urgency. Poe’s heart soars as one of his hands rises into Muran’s dark hair.

The kiss seems to last fifty lifetimes but it’s still over much sooner than Poe would have liked. They break apart and both of them are breathing heavily. Poe lets go of Muran and takes an unsteady step back, heart in his throat.

“Sorry,” he blurts out, terrified.

Muran wets his lips slightly, looking down at Poe, a little bit dazed. “You want to put a pin in this right now and talk about it over a drink later?”

Then, a tentative smile. This small gesture, despite how tiny it is, fills Poe’s heart with giddy amazement and hope.

“Yeah,” he says quickly, slightly breathless and grinning. “Yeah, yes. Definitely.”

Karé and Iolo choose this extremely opportune time to burst back in together, clad in all their gear and clamoring about how they’re going to totally kick the First Order’s butts. Poe grins at Muran, already walking away, and Muran smiles bashfully back.

They all clamber into their X-wings and Poe raises the signal for departure, still beaming to himself as the X-wings begin to trundle down the runway. He can’t wait for this mission to be over.

It seems pretty standard – as soon as they come out of hyperspace above Suraz 4, Poe assesses the situation and Rapier Squadron breaks into two teams: him with Karé, Muran with Iolo. The exhilaration of the fight catches up to him pretty quickly as he spirals through the air, flanked by Karé. He doesn’t have time to look at what Muran and Iolo are doing but trusts in them enough to know that they’re doing a good job.

Finally, a lull: the last of the TIE fighters are gunned down. Poe turns his X-wing around, BB-8 beeping congratulations to him, searching for more targets.

Something catches his eye: a glow in the rear of the _Yissira Zyde._ His heart lurches when he recognizes Rapiers Three and Four hovering near it.

“Muran! Iolo! Break port!” he shouts into the comlink, grip on the joystick tightening.

Iolo’s reaction is instantaneous, soaring swiftly out of danger, but Muran lingers just a second too late before he moves away. Poe’s stomach flips in horror as he watches the wake of the freighter’s jump into hyperspace buffet Muran’s X-wing. It rockets through space, beginning to tear itself apart, struck by too much force for it to handle.

“Muran!” Karé shouts, frantic, and Poe’s never heard such genuine, heart-rending terror in her voice before. “Muran, eject!”

There’s a crackling on the comlink, a faint voice that belongs to Muran: _“– Commander –”_

The last Poe ever sees of the first great love of his life is flames.

Karé screams, long and loud and horribly grating. It seems to echo on forever. Iolo swears and Poe hears him hitting things in the cockpit.

Everything past here fades away as Poe stares down at his controls, hands shaking on the joystick.

“Muran,” he says, and he feels completely helpless, like he’s eight all over again, standing next to his mother’s casket and placing her medallion on her chest.

“Muran, oh, God,” he says, voice breaking, and tears slide down his cheeks in a rush. He doubles over, hands flying to his face as he shakes uncontrollably, lost and tired and _oh, God, Muran._

His heart is viciously splitting in two as he sees it again, over and over and over, like a sick joke: Muran, bursting into flames, scattered across the galaxy. Muran, spiraling through the sky in pieces. Muran, becoming stardust. Muran.

“Muran,” Poe says again, and that’s all he can say.

 

They come back one X-wing short, feeling entirely hollow. Poe alights from his X-wing and stumbles, having to hold onto his ladder to keep himself steady. BB-8 helps prop him up as he leans against it, arms still shaking.

Karé and Iolo are there, too, and they’re putting his arms around their shoulders, solid and warm even if their shoulders shake with labored breaths and both of them have tear-stained cheeks.

Somehow, they manage to stumble back to their quarters and get Poe into his room. He thanks them in a haze, still seeing the flames behind his eyes. They leave him alone and go to their own bunks to grieve privately.

Poe takes his flight suit off, takes everything off, and steps into the shower. The water is cold but Poe doesn’t change the temperature, feeling like he might be burning up, too.

He scrubs himself until his skin is red and his fingers are wrinkled. When he comes back into his room he feels cleaner but not any better.

Then he spots it: the brown flight jacket that Muran gave him all that time ago. Lump in his throat, he picks it up. It seems heavier than it used to, if only because now it carries a lot more weight.

Poe slips it on and it hangs around his shoulders, as usual. Muran’s shoulders were always wider than his.

It still smells a little bit like Muran – like mint and motor oil.

The lump in his throat is there again as he hugs it closer to himself, closing his eyes to desperately seek out the last vestiges of that smell. If he concentrates very hard, it almost feels like Muran is still there.

Poe sinks to his knees, still weak, still unable to comprehend. It keeps flashing through his head, how if he’d been faster – if the Republic did anything to stop the First Order – maybe Muran –

There are tears running down his cheeks again as he brings a trembling hand up to his face, other hand still clutching at the flight jacket. They slip through his fingers and crash onto the floor, sparkling like stardust.


	2. close my ears and eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A combination of the drug, the heat, and the exhaustion finally close his eyes, and Poe’s last waking thought is a prayer that he won’t dream of Finn.

Poe is thirty-two years old and his throat is raw when the lights of a starship envelop him and he squints past them to see Iolo Arana striding towards him, hands already reaching out to sling Poe’s arm around his shoulders. Poe immediately collapses onto him, limbs weak and head spinning.

“Iolo,” he rasps.

“Yeah, I know, I’m the best,” Iolo mutters, but his voice softens into a tone of relief. “I’m really glad you’re safe, laserbrain.”

There’s a med droid onboard, armed with a bottle of water that Poe downs immediately, grateful for the cool relief. It forces Poe into a gurney as Iolo heads to the cockpit to take them back to D’Qar.

The mattress is thin and uncomfortable. Poe stares up at the pale ceiling of the starship. The same thoughts keep running through his mind, albeit a little more sluggishly now: he thinks of Finn, the beautiful boy with the beautiful eyes. His giddy smile when he helped Poe escape. His body, long since devoured by the sands that took their TIE fighter and Muran’s jacket.

Bile rises in Poe’s throat abruptly at the thought, a sick feeling that’s been festering unpleasantly in his chest ever since he stumbled out of the wreckage and found himself in a desert wasteland. He lifts himself up, leans over the side of the gurney, and retches. The acid burns his throat and tears come to his eyes.

The med droid, who’s been standing guard next to him, flares to life and immediately shoves a bucket under his face. Poe stares down into it, whole body shaking, as he coughs up the little food he had in his system.

“Can I assist you?” the droid asks.

“I – man, just give me something to help me go to sleep,” Poe says, voice shuddering. “The good stuff. Strong stuff.”

He hasn’t slept for more than two hours continuously in the past two days. Every time, visions of Finn being suffocated by the sand cause him to jolt awake in cold sweats, hands uselessly outstretched, reaching for someone else he couldn’t save.

The med droid produces a needle and injects the dull blue fluid into his arm. Poe feels waves crash over him, limbs growing heavy.

“Serum successfully administered,” it says, drawing back.

A combination of the drug, the heat, and the exhaustion finally close his eyes, and Poe’s last waking thought is a prayer that he won’t dream of Finn.

 

Poe wakes up in the med bay on D’Qar, eyes opening to see wires attached to him, hooked up to a monitor that beeps periodically. His vision is still fuzzy and it takes a while for him to regain it but when he does, the same med droid who took care of him on the starship is idling next to his bed.

He tries to sit up, finding that his back is aching, and the slight movement catches the med droid’s attention as it activates, flitting over to his bedside to check his vital signs.

“Commander, how do you feel?”

“Shitty,” Poe groans.

“Error processing data.”

“Bad,” Poe corrects himself, forgetting that they don’t program droids that way. Most droids, anyway. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Ten hours, Commander. General Organa left a message.”

Poe’s stomach drops at the mention of the General and he remembers that oh, God, he failed. Leia Organa, the woman he was prepared to die for (is still prepared to die for) trusted him with an incredibly crucial mission and he failed her. He’s terrified to hear what it might be.

“What was the message?” he asks regardless, swallowing nervously.

“She wishes to see you in the command center as soon as possible.”

“Oh,” Poe says, and his voice stutters. “Can I go now?”

“You are not to be discharged from the hospital wing until you are cleared by your nurse,” the droid says, and its tone would be stern if droids could convey tone.

“Who’s my nurse?”

“Bryn Wexley,” it replies, and Poe sighs in relief. He’s met Bryn – Snap’s partner – several times, and they’re bound to discharge Poe if he pushes hard enough.

“Can you call them in?”

“Affirmative,” the droid says, and presses a button next to his bed. Several minutes later, Bryn bustles in, blithe smile on their face as they take off their gloves and drop them in the trash. They’re one of the only Twi’leks on base, blue skin standing out against the all-white of the hospital room.

“Commander Dameron,” they say. “We all thought you were dead.”

“Well, as you can see, I’m not,” Poe replies. “And I’d really like it if you cleared me. I need to see General Organa as soon as I can.”

“Sure,” Bryn says cheerily, walking to his bedside. “But the thing is: you can’t.”

“Take pity on me,” Poe groans, moving his arms and legs experimentally. His muscles ache but that’s nothing new: long days of X-wing training have numbed him to muscle pain. “You seem like such a sweet person. Uh, Twi’lek.”

“Thank you,” Bryn replies. “No.”

“Come on,” Poe persists. “You owe me.”

“How so?”

“I’ve saved Snap’s life, like, five times already.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Bryn says, still smiling. “No.”

“Please,” Poe says, and there’s a definite note of pleading in his voice that seems to get Bryn’s attention. Their smile fades slightly as Poe continues: “Please, let me see the General – I failed her mission and I need to own up to it. I need to make it right.”

Bryn is silent for a while then, Poe’s impassioned plea clearly starting to create a moral quandary for them. For a moment, Poe is afraid they’ll force him to go back to sleep with some of the serum that put him to sleep on the starship, but finally they say, a bit begrudgingly: “Okay. Fine.”

“Thank you,” Poe says, genuinely grateful, as Bryn turns to the med droid.

“Clear the patient to be discharged.”

“Confirmed,” the med droid says, and turns to Poe. “You have been discharged and may leave the med bay.”

“Thank you,” Poe repeats, this time to both the droid and Bryn.

It takes a fair while for him to summon the strength to stand up but he finds that once he does, it doesn’t take a long time before he’s emerging from the med bay, wearing the standard issue clothes that they gave him. He doesn’t feel quite right without Muran’s jacket around his shoulders, still smelling faintly of mint and motor oil. Karé scrunched her nose up when Poe told her that he never washes it just to preserve that scent.

“Nasty,” she’d said, but he knew that she understood.

He heads to the command center, stomach in knots, prepared for the very worst. Namely: General Organa being very disappointed in him and sending him packing, head hung low in shame, as his friends watch him go.

The thought makes him despondent and he enters the command center in a much worse state of mind than before. The General spots him as soon as he walks in.

“General,” he says, unable to meet her eye.

“Commander,” she says. “Let’s talk privately.”

Poe follows her to her office, not looking at any of the people who glance at them curiously. Iolo is coaching a young pilot nearby, stalling for a moment to look up at Poe.

The door closes behind him and Leia sits on the edge of her desk, arms crossed. Poe stands before her. It’s eerily reminiscent of how she assigned him this mission in the first place.

“I’m glad to see you’re alive and still in one piece,” she says. Her voice is measured and he can’t discern her mood from her tone.

“I’m sorry, General,” Poe replies, eyes downcast.

“For what?”

It all comes rushing out in a guilt-ridden flood: “I wasn’t able to retrieve the map. I gave it to BB-8 for safekeeping and told it to go as far away as possible because the First Order arrived shortly after Lor San Tekka gave it to me. I was captured by the First Order and Kylo Ren – he –”

The visions flash in his mind suddenly, of Kylo Ren’s icy, shadowy fingers curling around the feeling of flying with his mother and tearing it to shreds, slashing through the memory of Muran’s smile, crushing every happy thought that stood between him and the answer he was looking for. Poe has to stop, staring down at the floor, trying to regulate his breathing.

“He took the information from me,” he manages to continue, swallowing thickly. “I failed to stop him. I was saved by a Stormtrooper who defected from the First Order and risked his life – gave his life – to save me. And I – I failed. I failed to save him. I failed, General, I’m sorry.”

The General is very silent for a very long time. Poe finally musters the courage to look up at her face. She has gone slightly pale, expression unfathomable but terrible, and it shocks him. He’s never seen her look like this, so lost for words.

Finally, she speaks, quiet but still steady despite her expression: “You didn’t fail, Poe.”

“General,” Poe says, feeling worse now that she’s taking pity on him and trying to make him feel better. “The First Order most likely has the map by now, and it’s my fault. You don’t need to say otherwise. I’m owning up to it.”

“There’s nothing to own up to,” she says, and her voice is more resolute now. “You did what you could. That’s all any of us can do.”

“General,” Poe says again, voice growing tighter. “Please don’t try to console me.”

She snorts, against all odds. “Console you? I’m just telling the truth.”

Poe’s throat is tight and there’s a dull pain in his chest that he doesn’t understand. His eyes drop to the floor again.

He doesn’t see, then, when she moves forward. Two arms are around him as she leans up to hug him, one hand on the nape of his neck.

Poe is stunned, forgetting to hug back for a while, but his arms gingerly wrap around her in turn.

She strokes the back of his head and suddenly Poe is taken back: back to a time when he was very young and so much happier, when Mama’s smile was bright and her hands were warm as they stroked his hair, murmuring comforting words into his ear. The memory makes tears prickle at his eyes as he swallows thickly, tightening his grip and burying his face in her shoulder.

“You did what you could,” General Organa repeats, tone warm and maternal now. “You didn’t fail.”

“Thank you, General,” Poe whispers, and her comforting embrace eases the storm brewing in his mind.

 

His bunk is much smaller and much lonelier than he remembered. Poe flicks on the light, looking around the room, at the messy papers on the desk and the messier clothes strewn on the floor.

He steps into the shower to try and forget, to try and wash away the thoughts of Kylo Ren invading his happiest memories and smashing them to pieces, of Finn thinking that Poe left him to die on the surface of Jakku. But unpleasant memories pervade his mind no matter how much he scrubs himself. He thinks only of the three people he owed the most to, who he could never rescue.

When he comes out of the shower, he wears the clothes the med bay gave him, unable to face opening his closet and not seeing Muran’s jacket hanging in the middle.

The light goes out and Poe falls onto his bed. It’s cold. He turns onto his side, then onto his other side, then onto his back. He thinks of Mama, of Muran, of BB-8, of Finn, of General Organa.

His father’s words come back to him, as they have so often in the past, and he thinks that he might be cursed. The beautiful things that come in contact with Poe are the things that burn.

Poe sleeps restlessly, haunted by visions of Finn, Kylo Ren's ice-cold grip crushing him until he is nothing but sand.

 

The next morning a distress signal wakes him up and he’s running down the hallway, flight suit half on, in a matter of minutes. Everyone is gathered in the command center as General Organa strides out of her office and everyone falls silent. Her face is somber and stony.

“Today, the First Order fired at the Hosnian system,” she says. “Several planets were obliterated, including the Republic’s capital.”

Immediately, the room fills with uneasy muttering. She lifts a hand to quiet the crowd and everyone falls back into a hush.

“This is a grave offense and millions of lives were lost in the attack. We have located the source of the attack and we believe it to be a planet-sized superweapon called Starkiller Base. It is imperative that this be shut down as soon as possible: it is very likely that, once they locate our base, they will turn it to us. Be wary, everybody.

“Currently, however, Maz Kanata has requested our assistance on Takodana,” she continues. “The First Order have launched a siege on the planet in the name of their Supreme Leader. I’m sending Red and Blue Squadrons to handle the situation. You depart in T-minus twenty minutes.”

Everyone who isn’t supposed to be there files out of the command center, talking amongst themselves – some in fear, some in anger. Some people have begun to cry, no doubt because their loved ones were on the planets destroyed.

Poe pushes through the mess to the General, ready to receive the mission details.

She gives him the once-over and says: “No.”

“What?”

“You’re not well enough,” she counters. “You’ve been through a great ordeal and you need to rest.”

“I _need_ to go on this mission,” Poe says, desperate. “I’m useless here. I’ve already failed to save one life and I’m not going to let others be lost when I could be doing something.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Commander,” she says. “Your teams are more than capable of handling it without you.”

“General,” Poe says stubbornly, drawing himself up. “With all due respect, if you don’t let me go on this mission, I’ll sneak into the hangar and go anyway.”

The General regards him suspiciously, then sighs a little and turns away. “I suppose I can’t stop you.”

“You can’t,” Poe says as she returns to her office. “That’s part of my charm.”

“You wish,” is the last thing she says before the door of her office closes.

 

Jessika hands Poe his helmet as he walks into the X-wing hangar, smirking.

“Did she let you come or are you actually disobeying your General’s orders?”

Poe rolls his eyes at her, putting the helmet on. “She let me come on the mission, Pava. I’m invaluable. And I’d never disrespect an officer with superiority over me – unlike some people I could name.”

“Okay, Boss,” Jessika snorts, beginning to climb up to her X-wing’s cockpit.

“Good luck, Jess,” Poe says with a smile, saluting her. “Come home safe. Karé will kill me if you don't.”

“You got it,” she calls out, already clambering into the cockpit.

When Poe climbs into his X-wing, it feels wrong without BB-8 behind him, chirping aimlessly about the things it heard and did around the base that day.

He hops into the cockpit and his foot immediately bangs against something on the floor. Swearing quietly, Poe reaches down to pick up a small box. It’s empty. He just looks down at it for a while, mouth suddenly quite dry, and remembers what it was for.

 

The day after Muran dies, Karé knocks on Poe’s door and enters without waiting for his reply. He glances up at her and has to do a double take.

Gone are the long, flowing braids that she used to take so much pride in. What remains, instead, is hair less than a quarter of its former length, tied back in loose plaits.

“Karé,” Poe starts, heart aching, and realizes that Muran’s death has hit all of them hard.

“I know,” she says, voice flat. “We have to, um, clear Muran’s bunk.”

“Oh,” Poe says.

They make quick work of it, none of them willing to spend too much time in a place that seems haunted now. Iolo gets all of Muran’s clothes, being of a similar build, and spends hours upon hours washing them until Muran’s smell is completely gone. Poe puts a reassuring hand on his arm, knowing that Iolo has his own way of grieving, and that reminders of what they’ve lost will only do more damage.

Iolo’s eyes have never been gray but now they are, dull and lifeless, and this is more unsettling than anything else Poe’s ever seen. He goes through Muran’s closet methodically, looking like he wants more than anything to be out of there as soon as possible. Poe glances at him and thinks about what it must be like to have eyes that betray your emotions in any situation, without fail. They probably make it necessary to keep everything else under wraps.

Karé takes Muran’s toolbox and opens his drawers. She finds hundreds of schematics and small inventions, all unfinished, all incomplete. On his desk are stacks of notebooks, overflowing with unrealized ideas, formulae and hypotheses that Muran scribbled at various stages of his life. Karé looks down at the pages, absentmindedly strokes the curves of his writing, and vows that she’ll finish each and every one of the inventions Muran started but never managed to complete.

“Iolo,” she says very solemnly. “Please say something so I don’t cry onto his books and ruin his writing.”

“I bet he’d haunt you specifically if you did,” Iolo says immediately, and Karé manages a small laugh, weak and watery. Iolo smiles too but his eyes are still gray.

Poe searches around Muran’s bunk, collecting everything that Muran ever claimed dear to him: comic books from childhood, handmade X-wing figurines from when he looked up at the sky and wished he could explore it one day, flight tapes of pilots Muran admired. They all go into a box that Poe fills to the brim.

He takes it with him when he and his friends join the Resistance, not sure what to do with it but unwilling to part with it. It stays on the floor of his X-wing, a reminder of why he joined the Resistance in the first place, of a man whose eyes were icy but never cold and wanted nothing more than to save the galaxy. He takes one of Muran’s X-wing figurines and keeps it in one of the empty pockets of his flight suit, its weight a great comfort to him.

Poe goes to a desert planet on one of his first Resistance missions and searches for the contact he’s supposed to be meeting. A young girl in the street, only as tall as his knees, runs up to him in the street, looking excited.

“Are you a pilot?”

Poe looks down at her in surprise. “Yes.”

“I want to be a pilot one day!” she exclaims, face lighting up. “Can you teach me?”

Poe can’t help but smile back at her excitement, going down on one knee to talk to her. “Sorry. I’m not here for very long and I have a lot of things to do.”

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says, sounding a bit downcast. “Is piloting hard?”

“Sometimes,” Poe says, and suddenly he feels Muran’s X-wing figurine in his pocket pressing against his thigh as he kneels. A thought occurs to him. He hesitates for only a few moments before taking the figurine out of his pocket and holding it out to her. “Here, you can keep this. You can practice with it.”

The girl giggles in delight, taking the figurine from him and looking at it in wonder. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Poe replies, smiling at her excitement. “I have to go now, but good luck. I bet you’ll be a great pilot one day.”

“Goodbye, Mister Pilot!” she says cheerfully, and runs away again, making the X-wing fly through the air, complete with wildly inaccurate sound effects. Poe watches her go, feeling a strange thrumming in his heart, and knows that Muran would have wanted this.

From then on, he keeps a few of Muran’s things in his flight suit whenever he has to go to a new planet, handing them out to anyone who might want it. Everything Poe has that belonged to Muran is slowly given away, spread across the galaxy, across star systems. It comforts him, slightly soothes the ache of Muran’s absence in his life. Even if – god forbid – he, Karé, and Iolo are all shot down, if there is nobody left to remember, at least there are still pieces of Muran, scattered around the galaxy.

 

When they descend on Takodana, Poe works himself as hard as possible, trying very hard to get the thoughts that have haunted him out of his mind. He reaches around the controls quicker than he ever has in his life, soaring and tumbling through the sky with unmeasured precision. He tries to focus completely on the mission, pushing the unpleasantness out of his mind.

After it’s over, when whoops and celebration crackle through the comlink, Poe sits back in his seat, sweating and panting but no less miserable. They jump into hyperspace and Poe puts a hand over his face, leveling his breathing. They’ve saved lives today, no doubt, but after the adrenaline of flying wears off he comes back down to earth and his spirits drop rapidly.

He returns to D’Qar and lands, noticing that everyone is much more on edge and working harder than they ever have before. Poe drops out of his X-wing and takes off his helmet.

A droid with a very familiar tone chirps at him: **[POE DAMERON!]**

He turns and the first thing he sees, the last thing he would have expected to see, is BB-8, beeping rapidly at him. A beatific smile spreads across his face immediately, air knocked from his lungs, as he runs over and falls to his knees.

“BB-8, my buddy! How did you – how did you get back here?”

BB-8 beeps: **[I WAS SAVED ON JAKKU BY A VERY NICE GIRL AND A MAN WHO SAID HE KNEW YOU EXCEPT HE WAS NOT AS NICE BECAUSE HE LIED TO ME ABOUT BEING PART OF THE RESISTANCE.]**

Upon hearing this, Poe’s heart leaps and his face goes slack. This hope – the first fragment of hope he’s allowed himself to indulge in since crashing on Jakku – is so strong that it almost knocks him over.

“Who saved you? Where is he?”

BB-8 chirps: **[HE IS OVER THERE BUT DO NOT BE SURPRISED IF YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY KNOW HIM AS HE MAY JUST BE A CHRONIC LIAR.]**

Poe’s head turns quickly, hope almost suffocating him, and sees Finn – actual, real, breathing Finn, looking right back at him. Finn, beautiful and bright, not buried in sand or crushed into stardust or lying among flowers.

“Poe,” Finn says, starting to run towards him, and Poe’s name sounds _so_ good coming from Finn’s mouth, not least because he thought it never would again.

Euphoria rises in Poe’s throat as disbelief melts into stunned joy and a wide smile comes to his face. He runs too, everything melting away until Finn’s face is the only thing he can see, the only thing that matters.

“Poe Dameron, you’re alive!”

“Buddy! So are you!” Poe exclaims, relief transcending any and all other words. They collide and Poe clutches at Finn’s shoulders when they part, eyes hungrily drinking in every detail of Finn’s wonderful, luminous face.

“What happened to you?” Finn asks, slightly out of breath. They talk rapidly, both trying to absorb the shock of the other being alive.

“What happened? I got thrown from the crash. I woke up at night, no you, no ship, nothing. BB-8 says that you saved it.”

“No, no, no, it wasn’t just me.”

“You completed my mission, Finn, I –”

Suddenly, a whiff of mint and motor oil. Poe is taken aback for a moment, tearing his eyes from Finn’s face to look down.

Finn is – Finn’s wearing his jacket – Muran’s jacket. Finn saved Muran’s jacket. Poe owes Finn his life, and now he owes Finn his deepest and sincerest gratitude for saving the last solid reminder Poe has of the man he loved.

Finn is wearing Muran’s jacket, and it really fits him, in more ways than one.

“That’s my jacket,” Poe says, staring down at it.               

“Oh,” Finn stutters out, starting to take it off, but Poe’s hands dart out to pull it back onto him.

“No, no, no, no,” he protests, not done with admiring how it looks on Finn. There’s something that’s just _right_ about it, something he can’t shake. It just – it fits.

“Keep it, it suits you,” Poe says, and finally gives away the last thing he had of Muran. He claps Finn’s shoulder, wanting desperately to hug him again, but afraid that if he indulges himself too much, Finn might slip away.

“You’re a good man, Finn,” he says instead, and means it: someone with so much light inside them is hard to come by, and to find one such soul while in the clutches of the First Order and close to death is nothing short of a miracle.

“Poe,” Finn says, eyes earnest as he places a hand on Poe’s shoulder. “I need your help.”

Poe looks back at him. He once knew a pair of eyes like this, dark and intense.

“Anything,” he replies, and his heart is completely full for the first time since Muran. “Anything you want, pal, I’m there. You saved my life.”

“It was the right thing to do,” Finn insists, then smiles a little bit. “And I also needed a pilot.”

“I owe you a million favors,” Poe replies solemnly, even if his insides are twisting up at seeing Finn’s smile again, warm and real. “You can quote me on that.”

“First favor? Take me to see General Organa,” Finn says. “I need to talk to her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i swear to god i'm getting to the stormpilot bit


	3. homeward, homeward

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Poe,” she says. “Please keep him safe while I’m gone.”
> 
> Poe swallows quietly, and nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is going to be 5 chapters now cause i have literally no impulse control and no concept of chill

Starkiller Base implodes slowly, almost majestically, allowing Poe’s team time to circle around it and crow victoriously at what they’ve just achieved. Poe stays silent, mind elsewhere, and flies low, dangerously close to the surface of the burning planet, eyes darting around.

BB-8 beeps: **[WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?]**

“Finn,” Poe says, canvassing the forests, searching desperately for the familiar lights of the Millennium Falcon. He hasn’t gotten word from base that it departed the planet, and the thought that Finn, General Solo, Chewbacca, and the scavenger girl – Rey – might still be there...

A voice crackles through on the comlink: “Black Leader, it’s time to go back.”

“Hold on, Pava,” he replies, distracted by the search. “I’ll give the signal when I’m good and ready.”

Jessika laughs. “I thought we were supposed to use callsigns in the field. But do whatever you need to do. Just so you know, though, General Organa’s waiting for us.”

“Shit,” Poe mutters under his breath, and watches as another section of forest catches on fire. He’s almost looped around the planet an entire time, unwilling to depart without knowing for sure that the Millennium Falcon and its passengers (Finn) are safe.

Poe thinks that having to live with the knowledge that he could have saved them but wasn’t able to might literally kill him.

All of a sudden, BB-8 chirps and whirrs frantically: **[TURN YOUR X-WING AROUND AND YOU WILL SEE A SIGHT THAT WILL NO DOUBT BE PLEASING TO YOU.]**

Poe obeys, swiveling his X-wing around, and the lights are blinding. He squints past them to see the Millennium Falcon soar up, a tad crookedly, and head out towards space. A relieved grin comes to his face, thankful that the ship is okay, trusting General Solo’s integrity enough to know that he wouldn’t leave the planet without Finn onboard.

“That’s it,” Poe says into the comlink, grin still plastered on his face as he takes his X-wing upwards and prepares to jump into hyperspace. “Our job here is done. Let’s go home.”

“Copy that, Black Leader,” Snap says as the rest of his team joins him, flanking him in a tight formation. There are a few ships notably missing, and later Poe will take a somber moment to remember the fallen, but right now the exhilaration of their success trumps everything else.

When he lands back on D’Qar, it seems like the entire Resistance has poured out to watch them land, some applauding and others talking amongst themselves. Karé and Iolo are right there at the front, running up to his ship when it lands, both beaming too widely for their faces. Poe throws his arms around the two of them as soon as he jumps down from his ladder, pulling them into a group hug that Karé halfheartedly protests against before hugging back even tighter. Iolo pats Poe on the back and Poe can practically feel his grin.

“Great job, man,” Karé says finally, drawing back.

“Yeah,” Iolo says as Poe removes his arms from their shoulders. “Fancy flying.”

“Thanks,” Poe says breathlessly, still giddily grinning. A surge of movement catches his attention: the Falcon has just landed and a crowd has formed, everyone pushing forward to catch a glimpse of the new heroes who saved the galaxy.

Poe pats Iolo on the shoulder, already pushing past him and Karé.

“Good luck, champ,” Karé calls out, laughing, as Poe breaks into a sprint, eager to see Finn and finally meet Rey.

He pushes past the crowd and emerges at the front, searching around for Finn, excited to smile at Finn and see Finn smiling back at him, to throw his arms around Finn in an embrace and to congratulate him with every breath.

But Finn isn’t there.

Poe’s eyes lock on Chewbacca, who has just come running down the ramp, arms full of – something. Or possibly someone.

Someone lying very limply in Chewbacca’s arms as the Wookiee groans and carries them toward a gurney that a group of medics have brought.

Poe stops dead in his tracks and everything seems to come to a standstill. There’s no mistaking that brown jacket, torn in half now. It all comes back again, in a blur: delirious thoughts of Finn screaming for help, screaming for Poe, as his face is swallowed by sand, eyes wide with terror and dismay. Poe, standing nearby, unable to move, unable to help.

“We’ve got a heartbeat,” a medic says, and the world snaps back into motion.

A girl wearing white robes runs down from the Falcon and reaches out to Finn, arm outstretched, but Finn is quickly enveloped by medics and nurses who load him onto their gurney, already beginning to hook him up to machines that will monitor his vitals. She stops, arm falling back to her side, and simply watches as Finn is rolled away.

Poe casts a glance at her face, fresh and young but solemn, and thinks that this must be Rey, the girl Finn risked his life to go back for. She looks lost, forlorn, and Poe thinks that perhaps now is not the ideal time for them to meet. Instead, he turns away and runs to catch up with the medics.

Bryn is there, calibrating a small device that Finn is wired to.

“Bryn,” Poe says to get their attention, brows furrowed in worry and one hand on Finn’s arm as he picks up the pace, keeping as close to Finn as possible. “Is he going to be okay?”

“With luck,” Bryn replies grimly.

Poe looks down at Finn’s face, which is ashen but still beautiful, and at his jacket, which now has a very ugly burn mark going straight through it. Poe swallows, trying not to think about how it got that way and how annoyed Muran would be to see his jacket being mistreated like this. His hand trails down Finn’s arm as they keep moving, finally stopping at Finn’s hand.

When he slides his fingers in the spaces between Finn’s, a spark courses through Poe’s body. Finn’s hand is warm and soft, far too soft for a hand that’s been trained from birth to hold a weapon.

Poe’s hope reignites, just like that, brighter than before.

“Don’t worry,” he says, looking up at Bryn. “I’m a lucky guy. I mean, I met him.”

Bryn snorts a little, but a tiny smile tugs at the corners of their lips regardless.

He follows Finn all the way to the med bay but Bryn blocks the doorway of Finn’s ward, shaking their head resolutely.

“Come on,” Poe wheedles, looking over Bryn’s head at Finn being wheeled towards the intensive care pod. “Please let me in.”

“Dr. Kalonia is working, and it’s not going to make any difference,” Bryn maintains stubbornly. “He’s going to be in there for a while. You’re not going to sit next to his bed that entire time.”

Poe doesn’t reply. Bryn scrunches their nose up.

“Oh, boy,” they say. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

“What happens to his clothes?” Poe asks, trying to change the subject. Bryn actually laughs out loud at this.

“Poe,” they chide. “He’s _unconscious._ Now, I know you want to see what he looks like shirtless –”

“Fuck off,” Poe shoots back, faint smile spreading across his face. It fades away very quickly, worry overtaking everything else. “I just – that jacket. It’s kind of important to me. To him.”

Bryn sighs in annoyance. “Okay, hold on. Arkay, barricade the door for me.”

The med droid responsible for this ward, an RK unit, replaces Bryn as the guardian of the doorway as they turn around to go to Finn’s gurney. They come back soon after, holding what appears to be a pile of rags in their hands.

“Here,” they say, dropping it into Poe’s hands. “Now will you leave the boy alone?”

“Sure,” Poe says, staring down at what remains of the jacket. “Thanks, Bryn.”

He turns away and walks slowly, still distracted by the jacket in his arms. The fabric is unmistakably the same, the familiar texture that he’s run his fingers over a million times before for reassurance. The only thing that’s missing is –

It doesn’t smell like Muran anymore. Gone is the lingering smell of mint and motor oil that has endured, against all odds, through several weeks. Gone is the last physical trace of Muran that existed past his death.

The jacket smells like burning, red-hot, searing pain. Poe knows it: it’s the smell that arose when Kylo Ren swung the lightsaber at Lor San Tekka. It’s the smell of a lightsaber slicing through flesh.

He swallows thickly as he thinks of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber, tearing ruthlessly through everything and everyone he ever loved.

Poe drops the jacket onto his desk when he gets back to his bunk, almost unable to face it. He’s so tired and this room is so small and so dark.

 

Poe should feel happy when R2-D2 wakes from his slumber and shows them the rest of the map. Really, he should. This is a monumental step and he _should feel happy._ Everyone else does.

As it is, though, Poe has found he’s excellent at projecting joy when the situation calls for it: a smile comes to his face as cheers fill the room and he hugs the person nearest him, stubbornly telling himself that _yes, this is happiness, the Resistance is finally one step ahead of the First Order, everything is as it should be._

He draws back quickly, realizing that he doesn’t know who he’s hugging, and gazes upon the face of the girl who reached out for Finn earlier that day – at her young, winsome eyes, and the sharp angles of her face. They stand, facing each other in a moment of awkward silence, before Poe realizes that he should probably make an introduction.

“Uh, hi,” he says, although it’s really more of a mumble. He’s never felt more inadequate in his life. Something about the quiet gravitas of her gaze disarms him. “I’m Poe.”

A spark of recognition: she nods slowly, eyes searching his face with a quiet solemnity. “I recognize the name. So _you’re_ Poe. Poe Dameron, the X-wing pilot. I’m Rey.”

“I know,” Poe replies, and relaxes, managing to smile. He wonders if Finn’s told her about him – if Finn talks about him as ‘Poe Dameron, the X-wing pilot’. Not a bad title. “Nice to meet you.”

She smiles back at him, a little tentatively, and Poe is soon distracted by Karé and Iolo singing a loud, hearty duet to celebrate the occasion. Rey turns around, surprised, then turns back to Poe, looking confused. Poe shakes his head and smiles, heart still aching but a little less, now, at the image of his two best friends in the world engaged in a moment of such pure joy.

“They seem odd,” Rey says, very frankly, and Poe laughs.

“They are,” Poe says. “But, well. They’re captains and I trust them, so they get to be included in some of the top-secret briefings. I have a feeling they’d ask to hear every detail from me even if they weren’t.”

“And you?”

“What?”

“What are you?”

“Oh,” Poe says, and gestures at his badge. “I’m a commander. This is the symbol for ‘Commander’.”

Rey nods slowly, absorbing the information. “Why are some badges red and others blue?”

“Blue badges are for people in the navy, like Admiral Statura over there, and I’m army personnel,” Poe replies, answers coming to him instantly: this is a world he’s lived and breathed for over ten years. “Hey, look, I’ll teach you all about this stuff someday, if you want.”

Rey smiles. “I’d like that.”

Then General Organa is there, a gentle hand on Rey’s shoulder. “Rey,” she says. “I need to talk to you about something.”

Rey nods, then looks at Poe. “Why doesn’t she have a badge?”

“She doesn’t need one,” Poe responds readily, winking at the General. “Everyone knows who she is.”

“Damn right,” says General Organa.

Despite the electrifying atmosphere of the room, Poe’s smile dies quickly, mind still occupied by thoughts of Finn, motionless in an intensive care pod. Iolo makes his way over to Poe and puts an arm around his shoulders.

“Cheer up, Commander,” he says joyfully, eyes gleaming pink. “Hey, come to the mess hall tonight. We’re going to celebrate.”

“I’ll be there,” Poe says, even if the sound of a massive celebration doesn’t much appeal to him. Iolo clearly hears something in Poe’s tone: he stalls and his eyes narrow, searching Poe’s face curiously. He’s always been better at reading Poe than anyone gives him credit for. Even if Iolo constantly denies it, Poe genuinely suspects that being Keshian gives you a better eye for people’s inner feelings, too.

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Iolo says finally. “You’ve had a stressful day.”

“No, no, I want to go,” Poe insists. It seems wrong of him not to go, after all: the Resistance has just scored a massive victory over the First Order, and he was an integral part of that. Objectively speaking, that is cause for celebration.

Iolo doesn’t seem convinced, patting Poe on the shoulder before drawing back. “Okay. See you there.”

Poe returns to his bunk soon after Iolo leaves him alone to do a ridiculously complicated handshake with Admiral Ackbar that makes everyone laugh. He shrugs off his flight suit and finds that someone has returned the clothes he was wearing several days ago on Jakku, now washed and ironed.

He puts them on simply because they’re there and remembers when they were stained with sweat and tears and sand, until there was no more moisture and no more hope left in him. Losing Finn on Jakku almost killed him, and the mere thought of losing Finn a second time is something he’s not even going to consider.

 

Poe goes to the mess hall that evening, trying to pretend that it’s been a normal day, that he hasn’t just helped to save the Resistance from destruction and that the man he owes his life to isn’t lying unconscious in an intensive care pod. He’s immediately greeted with raucous noise when he enters. Usually he sits with one of his squadrons or with Karé and Iolo but today, eight tables have been haphazardly pushed together to make room for everyone to sit together.

“Hey, guys,” he says, smiling widely despite feeling a little bit hollow. Fake smiles come as naturally to him as breathing nowadays. The tables are packed, everyone sitting shoulder to shoulder, when he approaches. “How about that mission, huh?”

“Amazing!” Karé shouts, raising her glass. “Best pilot in the Resistance, people! Raise a glass!”

A loud cheer sounds as everyone raises their glass to Poe, laughing and talking. Poe would normally revel in this atmosphere, would be in the center of it all, telling a daring and only slightly exaggerated story about how he felt up in the air, but tonight his mind is far away from here.

Jessika throws an arm around Karé’s shoulders, grinning at her. “Don’t forget the rest of us, Captain Kun.”

“I could never,” Karé replies, smiling back. “A toast to the Red and Blue squadrons for _helping!”_

“And to the ones who didn’t make it out,” Snap shouts. “We’re gonna do ‘em proud!”

Defiant shouts of assent fill the air as everyone toasts the fallen. Poe finds himself squeezed into a small gap that appears when Iolo forces people to make room for ‘everyone’s favorite poster boy’. Officer Tabala Zo is sitting next to him, furiously typing something on a datapad despite being jostled every now and again by the person sitting to her right, drink untouched on the table in front of her. Poe watches her fingers move across the screen rapidly for a moment before speaking.

“You should be celebrating, not working,” Poe says to her, easy smile on his face even if the numb ache in his chest isn’t going away and probably won’t any time soon.

Tabala casts him a sideways glance before returning to her datapad screen. “Statura’s got me running numbers on the info that we got from Starkiller Base before it – you know. Exploded. Nice work on that, by the way. Anyway, super important job. Gotta be prepared for the next time they build a giant superweapon that’ll most likely obliterate us and everything we know.”

Poe is a bit bewildered at the rapidity of her speech as she babbles on anxiously, knee jiggling under the table. Her eyes are wide and laser-focused on her task.

“Hey,” he says, and places a comforting hand on her arm. She stops abruptly and looks over at him, surprised. It’s a quiet moment in an otherwise deafening environment.

“Don’t worry,” Poe says, and he’s trying very hard to smile comfortingly. “We can handle whatever those bastards throw our way. And, hey, if they build another one of those things, I’ll just swoop in and make it explode. I’ve been told I’m very good at that.”

She is visibly reassured as he speaks, iron grip on her datapad relaxing. “Yeah,” Tabala says, voice still lacking conviction but he can see her beginning to accept it. “It’s just – my brother was on Hosnian Prime when they – you know.”

“Oh,” Poe says, heart dropping. “I’m sorry.”

“I hate the thought of other people having to know what that’s like,” Tabala adds hurriedly, ducking her head bashfully. “Losing someone you care about really sucks.”

“Yeah,” Poe replies, and moves his hand so that his arm is around both her shoulders. “You don’t need to tell me. But, hey, cheer up – we kicked their asses today!”

Tabala looks at him, then smiles tentatively. “You’re right. It’s a celebration. We could be dead tomorrow. I mean, I hope we aren’t. But we definitely could be. So this is worth celebrating.”

“Atta girl,” Poe says cheerfully, drawing back from her to reach for a drink. “When you find something beautiful, you hold onto it, even if it doesn’t last long. A toast to your brother.”

“Cheers,” Tabala replies, smile growing brighter. Poe is glad that she’s feeling better, even if he still feels shittier than someone returning from a hugely successful mission has any right to be.

He looks around the table and sees Iolo arguing loudly with Bastian about something or other. Further down: Jessika, leaning on Karé’s shoulder as Karé entertains a crowd of officers with a wild story from the Mirrin Prime days. At the very end: Lieutenant Connix, chugging whisky impressively quickly despite her small frame as Snap and a couple of pilots from Karé and Iolo’s squadrons laugh and cheer her on.

Muran’s favorite drink was whisky.

 _Great,_ Poe thinks to himself grimly as he downs the rest of his own drink. Now he’s thinking about Muran and he’s going to be in a foul mood for the rest of the evening. And Finn is lying in the med bay, hovering between life and death. Nothing seems to be going his way recently.

He briefly entertains the thought of being a massive hypocrite and going back to his bunk, but the thought of facing an empty bunk, Muran’s jacket lying in tatters on his desk, is even more unbearable than sitting amongst his peers, who are all high on cheap drinks and the thrill of victory and the ever-present knowledge that this celebration could be their last.

Tabala looks over at him curiously, putting her datapad back into the bag strapped to her hip. “Are _you_ okay?”

Poe purses his lips, staring down at the bottom of his now-empty bottle. He knows what his answer should be.

“No,” he says finally, and the smile that comes to his face is more of a grimace. “Not really.”

“Well,” she replies, sliding another bottle of cheap liquor over to him. “Here’s to more First Order ass-kicking. Tomorrow will be a better day, I promise. I mean, if we die, it won’t be, but if we’re still alive, you’ll be okay.”

“Thanks,” Poe says, still feeling hollow, but his smile softens into something more genuine as she pats him on the back, then leans across the table to arm wrestle Niv Lek.

 

The next morning, as soon as Poe wakes up, BB-8 rolls off its charging station and beeps: **[NEW MESSAGE FROM GENERAL ORGANA.]**

“Let’s hear it,” Poe says, sitting up and stretching. His muscles are aching without the adrenaline that comes with running a mission to mask the soreness.

**[MESSAGE: I’VE HEARD FROM A CERTAIN NURSE THAT THEY DISCHARGED YOU UNDER WRONGFUL CIRCUMSTANCES.]**

“Oh,” Poe says, movements stalling. “Shit.”

BB-8 interrupts its own message to chirp: **[WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE, COMMANDER.]**

“Sorry, Beebee,” Poe replies obediently, biting back a laugh. “Proceed.”

**[I’M TAKING YOU OFF MISSIONS FOR THE NEXT WEEK. YOU ARE TO REPORT TO THE MED BAY FOR A CHECK-UP EVERY MORNING. AND, NO, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO JUST SNEAK OFF BEHIND MY BACK. END OF MESSAGE.]**

“Ugh,” is Poe’s only response. The thought of not being allowed to go on missions for an entire week is torturous, and something he’ll probably contest, but the mention of the med bay reminds him that there’s someone who needs his attention. It’s the least he can do. He wears his military uniform instead of his flight suit, since apparently he’s not going to need that for a little while, and heads directly to the med bay.

Bryn is already guarding the door when Poe arrives at the ward Finn is being kept in, their arms crossed and expression stern.

“I’m not letting you in until you get your check-up,” Bryn says firmly. “I already made an exception for you once.”

“Yeah, and you ratted _yourself_ out pretty quickly,” Poe replies grumpily, trying to catch a glimpse of Finn’s face, which is obscured by the machines around him. “I respect the integrity but hate you for the outcome.”

“Sorry,” Bryn says, smiling. “Here, let’s go to the empty room next door and I’ll do your first check-up. Then we can come back here and I’ll let you sit next to your boyfriend’s pod for as long as you want. Sound good?”

“Fine,” Poe replies absentmindedly, eyes drifting over to Finn, as Bryn takes him by the arm and leads him to the adjacent room.

When the check-up is done and Poe is allowed to go back to Finn’s ward, he walks out to see Rey standing outside, staring at Finn through the window. Her fingers are lightly resting on the glass, eyes focused but simultaneously faraway. She’s wearing something very different to the white robes Poe saw her in last.

“Rey,” he says, walking up next to her. She doesn’t look at him.

“He’s going to be alright,” Rey mumbles, staring at Finn’s unconscious face. “Dr. Kalonia said he would be.”

“She’s usually right about these things,” Poe says. “Don’t worry.”

There’s a lull before Rey says: “I’m going away today.”

Poe looks over at her, surprised. “Where?”

“Luke,” says Rey, very simply, and Poe thinks that this must have been what General Organa wanted to talk to her about yesterday.

“Good luck,” he says. Rey finally tears her gaze away from Finn to smile at Poe, looking very young and very scared but very brave, regardless.

“I’m going to say goodbye to him.”

“Go on,” Poe says gently.

Rey turns and enters the room. Poe watches as she sits by Finn’s bed, looking at him with achingly genuine tenderness in her eyes. Her lips move slowly as she speaks, a farewell to a beloved friend, and leans over as far as she can to kiss Finn’s forehead.

When she comes out she stalls by the doorway, seeming to consider something, before looking at Poe.

“Poe,” she says. “Please keep him safe while I’m gone.”

Poe swallows quietly, and nods.

“I promise,” he says, and means every syllable. “I won’t let anything happen to him. And, hey, when you get back and finish saving the galaxy I’ll teach you anything you want to know. Okay?”

Rey smiles, a tad tearfully. “Okay.”

She casts one final glance back at Finn before turning away and heading out.

Poe stands outside the room and watches Finn sleep for a while. There’s something preventing him from entering the room, something intangible but much harder to pierce through than glass: a terror that, if he lets himself get too close to Finn too quickly, he’ll be ripped away abruptly.

Poe won’t let that happen again. He promised he wouldn’t.

BB-8 finds him twenty minutes later, chirping loudly down the hall: **[POE, THE MILLENNIUM FALCON IS GOING TO DEPART SOON AND EVERYONE IS OUT THERE SO I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT TO BE OUT THERE, TOO.]**

“I’m coming,” Poe calls back, reluctantly turning away from Finn’s ward.

The Falcon takes off as everyone cheers. It begin its ascent slowly with Rey at the helm, looking like she truly belongs there.

General Organa is very quiet amid the ruckus, silently watching the ship’s blazing lights disappear into the deep blue of the sky.

 

“What did you want to see me about, General?”

General Organa is sitting behind her desk, watching a holovid of their attack on Starkiller Base to study the First Order’s tactics. She looks up and shuts it off, raising an eyebrow. “You’ve been taken off duty for a week.”

“Yes, sir,” Poe says, saluting.

“Don’t do that,” she says. “It’s funny – three days have passed and not a peep from you. I would have expected you to be fighting tooth and nail to get your week back. Of course, I wouldn’t have yielded, but still.”

Poe shrugs and thinks of Finn, warm and solid, chest rising and falling steadily. “It’s not all bad.”

Poe returns to the med bay after that, as he has for the past few days at any given opportunity. Bryn has taken to putting out a chair next to Finn’s bed specifically reserved for Poe to sit in.

“I don’t understand the point of this,” Bryn says one morning when Poe settles in, datapad in hand. “His recovery isn’t going to speed up with you there.”

“I know,” Poe says, eyes trained on Finn’s face, which is the same as always.

Bryn seems to realize that Poe is a lost cause after a short while and their check-ups grow more and more infrequent. Poe sits by Finn’s bed every day for the rest of the week while BB-8 talks to the med droids and teaches them swear words. He doesn’t talk often, just reads stories he’s been meaning to read for a while but never got the chance to with all that’s been going on. Sometimes he reads aloud passages that he thinks Finn would like and hopes Finn hears them.

Dr. Kalonia comes in every two hours. Each time, without fail, Poe asks what Finn’s status is. And each time, without fail, she fixes him with a piercing stare and says: “Pretty much the same as it was two hours ago, Commander.”

After a few days, she lets him stay in the room overnight but warns him not to tell anyone. She doesn’t threaten him outright, but Poe is intimidated enough by her that he heeds her warning.

The unsavory thoughts come at night, as they so often do, when the darkness closes in and the med bay is silent save for the gentle hum of the machine Finn is hooked up to. Poe glances out the window at the smattering of lights, scattered across the darkness, and thinks of Muran, and beer bottles, and heat.

In moments like these, when he feels especially terrible, he’ll slip his hand under Finn’s to reassure himself. Finn never grips back, never even twitches, but the simple, warm presence of him is enough to make Poe think that things might be okay.

As it turns out, sleeping in a chair isn’t very good for your still-recovering muscles. Bryn gets very angry in the last check-up of the week.

“You are killing yourself,” they say, supremely annoyed. “Look, okay, I’m going to tell General Organa that you can go back to duty, but you’re going to have to go to one of our physical therapists for a while to get this worked out.”

“Bryn,” Poe starts.

“Don’t,” they say viciously, and dig their fingers into a particularly sore spot on Poe’s shoulder. Pain sparks and spreads all down Poe’s arm and back; he recoils violently, biting back a shout.

“That’s what you get for sleeping upright,” Bryn says a tad smugly.

“Okay,” Poe says, gritting his teeth as the pain ebbs away slowly. _Far_ too slowly. “Okay, fine. Point taken. Please don’t do that again.”

 

Poe returns to duty, but General Organa seems to taken Bryn’s words to heart: most of the missions he’s assigned are either recon or patrol, with very little strenuous activity involved. His squadrons are bored to tears by it.

“Jessika says you guys are getting all the shitty missions and it’s your fault for being too devoted to your comatose boyfriend,” Karé says one evening. She and Iolo are sitting on the floor of her bunk, playing a card game that Iolo invented while day-drunk one morning, while Poe lies on Karé’s bed, muscles beginning to ache.

 _“Jessika_ blabs too much,” Poe complains. “And you can tell her that I’m never telling her anything again.”

Karé laughs and lays down another card.

“You’re not playing this right,” Iolo says. “What’s the deal with you and Jessika, anyway?”

“Nobody understands the rules except you,” Karé shoots back, taking back the card. “And there’s no _deal._ ”

“I made the rules _perfectly clear_ in my briefing, so it’s not my fault you have terrible listening skills,” Iolo says, reaching into his pocket to fish out a hand-written manual that he tosses to her. “There’s very clearly a deal. Poe, back me up here.”

“This is doing nothing to help me,” says Karé, brow furrowing as she reads. “And Poe isn’t going to back you up because he’s a smart man who understands that there is no deal.”

“That’s sweet of you to say,” Poe says, smiling at the ceiling. “But I support Iolo’s hypothesis that there is, in fact, a deal.”

Iolo laughs and Karé throws a card at his face.

 

A few more weeks pass without even a mild disturbance from the First Order. General Organa gets very suspicious and increases the number of patrol missions. Because of their thinly spread resources and the fact that Poe’s two-day stint on Jakku is still affecting his physical performance, Jessika is given temporary control of Blue Squadron, leaving Poe to command just Red. Whenever he’s not doing missions or down in the command center, Poe is back in the med bay, waiting for Finn to wake up.

They’re all in the X-wing hangar one day right after Dagger Squadron returns from a recon mission. Jessika is playing her music very loudly, a warbling tune that makes Poe think of rivers winding through hilly terrain. It makes sense considering where Jessika is from.

Iolo gets out of his X-wing and comes over to Poe as Poe slides out from under his X-wing. He smiles up at Iolo.

“Welcome back, handsome.”

“How was your day of X-wing maintenance?” Iolo asks, taking his helmet off.

“Mundane,” Poe replies, standing up and picking up his toolbox. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and his forearms are stained with motor oil. It’s one half of a smell he’d prefer never to think about again.

Iolo stands against Poe’s X-wing, looking over at Karé’s X-wing, which is customized and has a green stripe down the side. His eyes are a cool blue. Jessika is leaning against Karé’s X-wing and sorting through some flight tapes as Karé works, although both of them are far more focused on the conversation than on their work.

“I don’t like those two together,” Iolo remarks.

“Why not?” Poe says, wiping sweat from his forehead. “I think they’re kind of perfect for each other.”

“Yeah,” Iolo says. “But together they’ll be twice as loud.”

Poe laughs, looking through the toolbox for a socket wrench, and is still laughing when the hangar doors burst open and Bryn runs in, wearing their nurse uniform. They’re very out of breath.

“Poe,” they say. “Poe, he’s up.”

The toolbox clatters to the floor immediately and Poe’s vision falters for a second: he takes a stumbling step back, head spinning.

Then he’s off, racing through the X-wing hangar with only one thought in his mind.

Faintly, he hears Iolo shout: “Go get him, tiger!”

Poe sprints out of the hangar and through base with no regard for anyone around him. He’s in the med bay in a matter of minutes, crashing through the door to Finn’s ward, heart in his throat. Poe catches his breath and looks at Finn to see –

Nothing new.

Finn is still lying there, chest rising and falling, but otherwise completely motionless.

Poe moves to his bedside hesitantly, telling himself that he’s literally going to throw Bryn off a cliff if this is some kind of sick joke.

“Finn?” he tries, and hears only silence and the hum of the machine. His mouth is very dry all of a sudden.

The silence lasts only a few seconds but to Poe it stretches on for several eternities as he hopes against all hope that Finn really is awake.

Suddenly, a feeble cough that sends electricity through Poe’s heart. Finn slowly opens his eyes and stares up at Poe, a lazy smile curving languidly across his face, the most radiant thing Poe has ever seen.

“Commander,” he rasps, and for the first time in weeks, Poe doesn’t feel hollow anymore. His heart is so full and so warm, like Finn’s smile has turned his blood into liquid sunlight: his knees grow weak and he falls into the chair by Finn’s bed, beaming widely.

“Buddy,” he whispers, and grabs Finn’s hand, which is warm and alive and twitches slightly under his, like Finn is trying to clutch it back. “Buddy, you’re awake.”

“Yeah,” Finn breathes. “Rey?”

“She’s okay, she’s totally fine,” Poe says, and Finn exhales a sigh of relief. “She left to find Luke Skywalker and she told me to keep you safe while she was gone.”

“Did you?”

“Damn right,” Poe says, and grins. “I always keep my promises.”

Finn tries to laugh but it turns into a coughing fit that makes him grimace in pain as he convulses. Poe’s grip on his hand tightens.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Finn manages once the coughing stops, and his eyes roam over Poe’s face. “How long…?”

“Four weeks,” Poe replies. Finn closes his eyes and groans quietly.

“I’m sorry,” is all he can say. Poe is stunned for a moment, unable to believe that Finn would apologize for this.

“Finn,” Poe says, very seriously, and puts his other hand on Finn’s shoulder. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You saved us all.”

“Wasn’t me,” Finn rasps, but Poe shakes his head, determined to make it known to Finn just how much he’s done for everyone.

“Without you, we’d all be dead,” Poe says, and Finn’s eyes open again. Poe’s gaze is fierce. “We all owe you our lives. Some of us for the second time.”

A small smile comes to Finn’s face as he looks at Poe, and Poe’s heart is so full that he could almost cry. The hand clutched in his moves slowly to squeeze back. Finn isn’t yet capable of more than a weak tightening of his grip but it’s enough to make Poe grin widely in a way that he hasn’t in what seems like forever.

“I’m really glad you’re back,” Poe says, deliriously happy.

“Me too,” Finn whispers.

 

Finn recovers his strength impressively quickly, at least according to Dr. Kalonia. Poe is reading by Finn’s bed while Finn is napping when she calls him out to talk to him about something.

“He’s recovering very speedily,” she says. “I’ve been to his physical therapy sessions. His progress is quite remarkable.”

“Yeah, he’s a special one,” Poe says. “He’s a trooper. Or more like ex-trooper.”

Dr. Kalonia fixes him with an unimpressed stare before looking back down at her datapad. “He’s going to have to stay here for another week, I’m afraid. Go in there and tell him that, would you?”

“Why me? You’re his doctor.”

“I would,” she says, turning her datapad off. “But he’d probably take it a lot better coming from you.”

“Fair enough,” Poe replies, and goes in. Finn is sitting up in bed when he returns. Poe’s datapad is on his lap.

“Hey, pal,” Poe says, sitting down at the foot of Finn’s bed. “Bad news. You gotta stay here for another week.”

Finn sighs quietly. “I feel so useless sitting here. General Organa says she wants to talk to me after I get out.”

“Trust me, you’re far from useless,” Poe says. “What’re you doing?”

“Is this yours?”

“Yeah.”

Finn is quiet for a moment, dark eyes scanning one particular passage over and over again.

 _“And she dreamed of endless summer,”_ he reads aloud, the last line of one of Poe’s favorite paragraphs. He holds the datapad up to show Poe. “There’s a star beside this paragraph.”

“It’s one of my favorites.”

Finn absentmindedly traces his finger over the words, eyes contemplative. “I like it.”

“Really?”

Finn nods, then looks up at Poe. “Can I read this?”

“Go for it,” Poe says, smiling. He’d give Finn just about anything if he asked for it. Finn seems to be wavering between something for a moment before he asks: “Can I read it aloud?”

Poe is surprised for a moment. “Okay.”

“It’s just that I don’t get many visitors, so I don’t have a lot of opportunities to talk,” Finn says. “The only people who come here other than you are Dr. Kalonia and my nurse, who’s kind of scary and always busy.”

“They certainly are,” Poe concurs. “And their name is Bryn, by the way.”

“Oh,” Finn says, and smiles. “Thanks. I was afraid to ask because at some point it just gets too awkward to just – ‘Hey, I know I see you every day, but what’s your name?’”

“I get that,” Poe says with a laugh, and moves over to sit down in his regular chair. “You can only call someone ‘nurse’ for a finite amount of time. And feel free to read aloud as much or as little as you like. It’s just nice to hear your voice.”

Finn looks at Poe for a moment, surprised, then ducks his head bashfully. Poe smiles at him fondly, happy that Finn is happy but beginning to think about how Finn doesn’t get any visitors.

The next day, Poe brings Karé and Iolo along with him on one of his very frequent visits because they’re the only ones who seem excited at the prospect of finally meeting Finn.

“Please don’t embarrass me,” Poe says as they walk through base and towards the med bay.

“You embarrass yourself,” Karé says immediately. “But okay. We won’t contribute to that.”

“I’m excited to meet your new boyfriend,” Iolo says. “Real quick, before we go in there: what’s he like?”

“He’s got the biggest heart,” Poe replies.

“So that’s your type?” Iolo says.

“Yeah, I guess,” Poe says, and a lull falls over the conversation. They’re all thinking the same thing: Muran might have been prickly on the surface but there had never been any doubt that his heart was the purest and truest of all of them.

Then Karé shatters the moment: “Is ‘big heart’ a euphemism?”

“Fuck off,” Poe shoots back as Iolo guffaws. Heat rises to his cheeks, regardless, which Karé definitely notices.

When they get there, Poe knocks on the door of Finn’s ward, hoping Finn isn’t asleep, and opens the door when he hears Finn call out: “Come in.”

He’s sitting up in bed and watching the holovid of the attack on Starkiller Base, which Poe was reluctant to give him but eventually did because he cannot say no to Finn, even if he tries (he can only assume; he’s never tried). Karé and Iolo file in after Poe and it’s the first time he’s ever seen both of them not know what to say.

“Hey, Finn?”

“Yeah?” Finn looks up and his eyes are immediately drawn to Karé and Iolo. His brow furrows slightly in confusion. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Karé says cheerily.

“This is Karé and Iolo,” Poe says, gesturing to each of them when he says their names. “You were saying that you don’t really have many visitors, so I brought you two more.”

“Oh,” Finn says, and begins to smile. He looks at Poe. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, bud,” Poe says, and something in his tone makes Iolo snort. Finn looks over at Iolo and appraises his eyes, which are shifting in color as they usually do when Iolo is nervous.

“I don’t mean to be, um, insensitive, but what species are you?”

“No problem,” Iolo says, relaxing slightly. “I’m Keshian.”

The conversation begins to flow smoothly from then on. Poe grabs two spare chairs for Karé and Iolo and they sit by Finn’s bed, getting to know him. Poe just sits and watches, not involving himself in the conversation unless specifically invited to. He finds his gaze continually returning to Finn, who is a natural conversationalist and really quite beautiful when he speaks, all easy smiles and quick retorts.

Half an hour later, Karé’s comm beeps and she looks down, scrunching her nose up in annoyance. “Iolo, we gotta go. We’re flying out in twenty minutes.”

Iolo grunts in disappointment and stands up. “Sorry, Finn. We’ll come back some other time, if you’re okay with that.”

“That’d be really nice,” Finn says.

“Later, Commander,” Karé says, saluting Poe, and the two of them leave. Finn watches them go until they’re out of sight, then looks over at Poe with a smile.

“I like ‘em. How long have you all been friends again?”

“Eleven – whew, no, _twelve_ years,” Poe says, and exhales. “That’s a fair while. We were all in a squadron together in the Republic, and then we all joined the Resistance together.”

“Just the three of you?”

Poe’s response hitches in his throat and he finds that he isn’t quite able to look Finn in the eye. “Um, no. We had a fourth member.”

Finn’s brow furrows slightly. “They didn’t join with you?”

“No, um, I’m sure he would have,” Poe says, thinking that Muran would have been the first to volunteer, without question. “He, uh. There was this mission, and the First Order –”

Poe has to take a moment to regather his thoughts, which have suddenly scattered: talking about Muran is still difficult, even without Finn’s gaze trained on him, dark and inquisitive but slowly beginning to put the pieces together. There once was a boy like this, who made the same warmth erupt in Poe’s chest – someone very different but just as good.

“Anyway, he didn’t make it out,” Poe says finally.

“I’m really sorry,” Finn says, and there’s a note of genuine sorrow in his voice, despite never having known Muran – despite not even knowing his name. “What was he like? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to,” he adds hurriedly.

“No, no, it’s okay,” Poe says, because anything Finn asks is something he’ll want to give an answer to. “He was grumpy pretty much all the time, but if you ever needed anything he’d be there to help you. Like how, um, one time he and Karé got into a fight about – something. It’s really not that important anymore. But that night she found out that her sister was in the med center. And even though they’d had that big fight, he let her into his room and talked to her until she felt better. Stuff like that.”

“He sounds like a very good person,” Finn says.

“He was,” Poe says, and smiles despite himself.

It’s the first time since Muran’s death that he’s ever actually talked about him. They never even had time to hold a funeral. Karé and Iolo were always grieving in their own ways. Any more discussion would have seemed excessive.

He feels like something’s changed all of a sudden. Some kind of catharsis. As if he didn’t already owe Finn enough.

“He’s the one who gave me that jacket,” Poe adds. “Your jacket.”

“Where is it now?” Finn asks curiously, shifting in his bed. “I’ve been meaning to ask that for a while. I liked it.”

“I liked it, too,” Poe says. “But that lightsaber really did a number on it. It’s in my room – or what’s left of it, anyway. I didn’t know what to do with it while you were asleep, but, um – what do you want to do with it? It’s yours.”

Finn is silent, looking down at his lap.

“I think I might just want to have it here,” he says after a long while of contemplation.

“No problem, buddy,” Poe replies. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay,” Finn says. “Thanks.”

Poe suddenly finds one of his hands being gripped tightly by Finn’s, reassuring and warm. He looks down in surprise, then up at Finn, who smiles at him so fondly that Poe finds it difficult to breathe all of a sudden.

“No problem,” Poe repeats, and smiles back.

 

Finn is discharged at the end of the week. Poe is by his side when the machines are finally turned off and Finn gets out of bed, stretching and wincing slightly. The clothes they’ve given him are loaded into a bag that Poe offers to carry, but Finn declines, saying that Poe’s done more than enough for him already.

Bryn reads off their datapad as Finn prepares to leave: “You’re going to have to continue going to physical therapy but other than that you’re mostly fine.”

“Thank you,” Finn says, unable to keep a smile off his face. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

“Not a problem,” Bryn replies, smiling back. “We’ve dropped off some painkillers in your bunk just in case you need any.”

Finn pauses to absorb this information before speaking again: “My bunk?”

Bryn looks over at Poe, arching an eyebrow. “You didn’t tell him?”

“It never came up,” Poe says.

“You are ridiculous,” Bryn says with a shake of the head before turning back to Finn. “You’re bunking with this one here. That okay with you?”

“Yeah,” Finn replies, and looks at Poe, smile radiant. Poe can’t even look directly at him.

“Let’s go,” Poe says, and Finn nods. He brushes past Poe to exit the room first. As Poe leaves, Bryn says: “The walls are thin, Commander, don’t forget that.”

“Shut up,” Poe hisses, and Bryn laughs raucously as the door closes.

 

As they’re entering the bunk, Poe is still babbling about how it’s a mess because he never has time to clean it up, and that Finn should try to reserve judgment because he swears he’ll tidy it up if Finn wants, and it’ll look much better once some effort has been put into it –

“It’s nice,” Finn interrupts, looking around and drinking everything in. “Like someone would actually live here. Not like that ward in the med bay. You have no idea how boring staring at the same old white walls gets.”

“Well, there are definitely more interesting things to stare at in here,” Poe replies.

Finn smiles at that and his gaze lingers on Poe for half a second longer than it probably should. Poe’s heart leaps and – jeez, is it hot in here or is it just him? Every word in his vocabulary seems to have escaped him as Finn turns and begins to investigate the bunk in more detail.

“Here are the meds,” Finn says, picking up a packet from the desk that contains several bottles. “I don’t think I need them. But I’m going to keep them anyway because technically they’re the only thing I own, aside from clothes.”

“To be fair, it’s not much of a jacket anymore,” Poe suggests.

“Oh,” Finn says, and turns around abruptly. “I meant to tell you.”

“What?”

“Here – look –”

Finn digs around in the clothes bag he was given and takes out a brown flight jacket. Poe just stares, disbelieving. Finn holds it out to him. “Here, feel it.”

Poe takes it tentatively and the fabric is familiar – the way it feels under his fingers is something he never could and never will forget. It doesn’t smell like mint and motor oil anymore, but it doesn’t smell like burning, either. It’s new – something very different than what it used to be, but it feels the same.

“It’s – how did you do that?”

“I asked Bryn to help me get it fixed,” Finn says. “I know it must have meant a lot to you. Because of your friend.”

“Yeah,” Poe says, looking up at Finn. Finn’s expression is so earnest and genuine, like seeing Poe reunited with the jacket really is the only thing he wants, and Poe can’t help but step forward to hug him, jacket still clutched tightly in one hand.

Finn hugs back and Poe buries his face in the crook of Finn’s neck, grinning so widely he feels like his face might split in half. He doesn’t have any words for what he feels right now because Finn is so _overflowing_ with unadulterated goodness. He didn’t even know his heart could be this full, bursting at the seams, but it seems Finn is just full of surprises.

As Poe pulls away he tugs the jacket over Finn’s shoulders.

“I thought you’d want it back,” Finn says, confused, but puts the jacket on anyway.

“Don’t be silly,” Poe says with a small laugh. “It’s yours.”

Finn nods and Poe helps adjust it. When the jacket is on properly and there’s nothing to distract him, Poe realizes abruptly how close they’re standing, that he didn’t move back even a little bit after their hug ended. The hush that falls over them is very loud, matched only by how loudly Poe’s heart seems to be beating. Finn’s eyes are very dark.

The sudden heat brings sudden memories, unwanted and uncontrollable: Poe remembers a sky full of stars over a city full of lights, and a boy who outshone all of that. A glow that illuminates Finn’s face, too, brighter than anything Poe has ever seen.

Finn is right here, glowing, brilliant, nothing and everything like the boy who became stardust. The same dull ache ignites in Poe’s chest, thrumming against his ribs. He gazes at Finn’s beautiful face, still so gentle after years of being immersed in evil. Finn’s lips are slightly curved upwards and they look very soft and oh, God, Poe just _wants._

Then he remembers suddenly that theirs is a friendship forged in war and war is never beautiful. Poe simply refuses to be the reason another beautiful thing goes up in flames.

It takes all of his self-control to step away. Finn quietly exhales, releasing a long breath.

“I’m going to step into the refresher,” Poe says, swallowing thickly and already starting to back away. “Uh, we can talk about sleeping arrangements later. And I’ll tell you about how day-to-day stuff works on base. And, uh, yeah. Just wait a second.”

Poe ducks into the refresher before Finn can respond, shutting the door behind him. He’s shaking a little, hadn’t realized it until he’s confronted with the empty room and nothing but his own thoughts.

He’s slack-jawed and breathing unevenly when he looks into the mirror over the sink, seeing jagged edges and carefully constructed bravado and nothing even remotely close to what Finn deserves. It all comes flooding back, as nightmarish thoughts usually do, all at once: everything that ever brought happiness into Poe’s life, pulverized by Kylo Ren and his icy grip. Hope, quickly dwindling, even if he was Poe Dameron, whose patriotism could inspire whole crowds.

Then, suddenly, a singular ray of light in the form of a man in a Stormtrooper uniform, pulling his helmet off and looking at Poe with eyes that disarmed him. Who cared so deeply and _knew_ what the right thing to do was, even in an environment that should have crushed any and all trace of goodness. And his story would have ended with sand in a desert wasteland where nobody would ever find him, enveloping him until there was nothing left of the man who burned so brightly and too quickly. All because of Poe.

Finn is too good and Poe has erred before. That’s a mistake he won’t repeat: he loved too hard once and Muran was gone before he could even process it. Poe made a promise to Rey – to the girl who looks at Finn like he hung the stars in the sky – that he’d keep Finn safe, and he always keeps his promises.

When he regathers his thoughts and steps back into the room, Finn is sitting on his bed, BB-8 at his feet.

BB-8 chirps in a relatively reassuring tone (for a droid): **[I DO NOT THINK YOU HAVE UPSET HIM BECAUSE HE DID NOT SEEM EXTREMELY UPSET AND I KNOW THIS BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN ACQUAINTED FOR A LONG TIME.]**

Finn replies: “I don’t know what that means, but thanks.”

BB-8 looks over at Poe, and if astromech droids could convey facial expressions, it would no doubt look completely exasperated.

“Hey,” Poe says, leaning against the doorframe. “It’s almost dinner time. You hungry?”

Finn considers it for a moment before standing. “I could eat. Just as long as there’s more than one kind of food. I think I’ve had enough of protein bars to last a lifetime.”

Poe laughs, constantly amazed by this man, who has been through hell but keeps his good nature like no-one Poe’s ever seen. Finn’s certainly stronger than he is, that’s for sure.

“Oh, buddy,” Poe says. “You’re in for a pretty great surprise.”

**Author's Note:**

> hmu @jedipilotstorm on tumblr


End file.
